Sunday, 30 June 2013

Michael Portillo gives us the grandees' line for 2015: renunciation of Thatcher's education policy, dismantlement of the NHS the creation of which was in the Conservative manifesto in 1945, the kind of hostility to the police previously associated only with the sectarian Far Left (he identifies support for the police as Old Labour, and of course he is quite right), no Tory candidates against sitting Lib Dem MPs (at least where Ministers were concerned, we knew that, anyway), and the suggestion that somehow it used to be
considered Politically Incorrect to talk about the undeserving poor

The last bit is of course pure dross, with no factual basis whatever. Like "you used to
be called a racist if you mentioned immigration", or "there used to
be a taboo against criticising the monarchy". When, exactly? In all three cases, among others, nothing could be further from the truth.

On the question of exactly who Housing Benefit claimants are (or were), the man who at Oxford with David Cameron introduced him to the Radiohead that featured among Cameron's Desert Island Discs needs to check his privilege. But apart from that, Stewart Lee writes:

The political class
live in a west London playground no longer sullied by the unsightly poor, who
have been ousted by housing benefit cuts and rent hikes. But where have they
gone? And can the right's sudden and conspicuous consumption of Byron burgers
be mere coincidence?

Check Byron's progress on Google maps and you'll see the
shaped-meat retailer's eastern push follows the line of London's
gentrification, and the enforced economic exodus of its underclass, in a
microcosmic reflection of national trends towards the disappearance of the
dispossessed.

The crushed-beef chain's surge into once neglected areas like
Hoxton and Tower Hamlets, while welcomed by venal estate agents looking for
evidence that their patch is up and coming, is bad news for indigenous people.

Chelsea types, in their pink trousers and yellow jumpers, are coming,
displacing ordinary people, even as they themselves are ousted from the verdant
pasture of their own west London homelands by the property power of Russian
mafia and wealthy Arab spring escapees.

New Byron branches in Manchester and
Liverpool reflect similar spurts of gentrification. The rich are eating at
Byron in places where the poor once ate at Chicken Cottage, a name I will
appropriate for my rural retreat when I too am finally displaced from the capital.

I’ve followed the rail policy discussions on
LabourList recently with interest and welcome the fact there is now a serious
conversation taking place within Labour ranks about how the structure of the
rail industry can be improved.

A publicly owned and publicly accountable
railway has been the policy of my trade union since privatisation and 20 years
on it remains the only way to deliver value for money for taxpayers and
passengers.

The current position on the East Coast line can
be traced back to an emergency motion submitted to 2009 conference by ASLEF and
TSSA calling for the party to support retention of the line in the public
sector.

The not-for-profit East Coast’s current balance sheet vindicates
Labour’s position and shows that it has paid more money back to the Treasury
than any rail company since privatisation.

It’s worth noting that train operating companies
are asset light businesses. They don’t own the tracks, trains or the majority
of the stations. East Coast’s net assets are £7 million. Yes, £7 million on a
business with turnover of around £700 million.

Train companies provide a
service. Retaining them in the public sector once franchise expire, as Labour
are considering, would not be onerous on public liabilities. In
fact the profits could be reinvested in the industry to reduce fares, for
example.

The operational side of the industry is a good
place for Labour to start. Not-for-dividend private company Network Rail has
delivered many improvements in the last decade but its £30 billion (and rising)
debt timebomb is a bullet that will be have to be bitten by some future
government like it or not and is clearly more problematic.

Similarly the three
rolling stock companies who own the trains and lease them to train operators
are owned by offshore registered financial consortia who avoid tax and make
exorbitant profits.

Tackling this sector within a sector is a more substantial
challenge but a good place to start would be creating a public rolling stock
company. Labour could also consider a windfall tax on their profits.

Ed Miliband has been right to equate rail
companies alongside energy firms in his predatory capitalism narrative. Shadow
Secretary of State for Transport Maria Eagle MP has been a powerful advocate
for reform.

The party’s opposition to the EU’s Fourth Railway Package and its
liberalisation agenda is another significant development.

It is vital Labour has an imaginative rail policy
at the next election in order to reconnect with those seats in the commuter
heartlands of the South East and the Eastern region where the lost so badly in
2010.

On 5 July MPs will vote on whether to give
the British people their first say on the European Union for
almost 40 years.

The EU referendum private members' bill being proposed by
Conservative MP James Wharton could have been a great moment for Britain's
parliament, undermined in recent years by expenses and lobbying scandals.

It
could have been one of those critical moments when MPs put aside partisan
differences for the common good. But it won't be.

The Conservatives have chosen to make their bill
all blue. One by one, Labour MPs who joined us in supporting the Labour for a Referendum
campaign have been rebuffed. The first prime minister to promise a referendum
on the EU since Harold Wilson is now in danger of becoming a major
obstacle to one actually happening.

The bill will, of course, pass easily on Friday.
But it will do so with meagre cross-party support. Bringing Labour on board
would have given it a fighting chance while it goes through committee and then
returns to the Commons for another vote in the autumn.

However, David Cameron's
partisan meddling with this backbencher's bill has left many MPs from other
parties in a position where they feel they simply cannot support it; and that
means it will struggle to become law.

I have spent a good deal of my adult life
campaigning for an EU referendum. I have done so because as a businessman – I
founded and am the chair of the consumer products and shopping channel company
JML – I feel the EU too often hinders and frustrates economic growth in
Britain; and because as a British citizen, I think Brussels intrudes into too
many aspects of our daily lives.

But mostly I have done so because the organisation
Britain joined in 1973 has become a very different animal [he was against it then, too though] , and it's only right
that the general public get their say on these huge changes.

Regular polls and the meteoric rise of Ukip have
shown that Britain's membership of the EU is a crucial matter not just for
Conservative voters.

In the past few months one of the campaigns I chair, Business for Britain, has
demonstrated that there is a strong feeling in the business community that
Britain's relationship with Brussels must undergo a fundamental change.

I
helped set up Labour for a Referendum because I feel the Labour party will soon
also recognise the imperative for a new deal from the EU. Indeed, it seems the
shadow cabinet is now seriously considering backing a referendum in the coming months.

Yet, despite all this evidence that the EU issue
stretches across partisan, generational and personal boundaries, the
Conservatives have made only scant effort to embrace this new cross-party
reality.

Unfortunately, the referendum bill now looks more like a Tory PR
operation than a genuine movement for constitutional change.

Unhappily, it
gives greater credence to the suspicion that Cameron's promise of a referendum
in January was not because he believes it is the right thing to do, but rather
because he wanted to placate his vociferous backbenchers.

I'm pleased that
Labour's hesitance to match his pledge is seemingly based on ensuring it would
be held at a time that would not be detrimental to the British economy.

There is still time for Cameron. Time to reach
out to Labour and allow James Wharton to build up the undeniable cross-party
support that exists.

With greater numbers of Labour MPs coming around to the
idea of a referendum, and party advisers openly preparing the way for
a Labour pledge before 2015, the door is open for the sort of coalition the
country can be proud of to vote through a referendum and let the
people decide on the EU.

George Osborne’s political career should be lying
face down, lifeless, bobbing in the Thames. His statement last week should have been rebranded “The
Comprehensive Review of the Failure of Austerity”. The Tories’ central pledge
at the last election, after all, was that the deficit would be erased, wiped
out, vanished over the course of this Parliament: there should have been no
alleged need for further cuts after 2015.

But everything those who were smeared as “deficit
deniers” predicted would happen back when David Cameron and Nick Clegg began
cavorting in the Rose Garden has come to pass. Austerity has acted like a
growth-seeking missile, leaving Britain embroiled in a longer economic crisis
than the Great Depression itself. The underlying deficit is bigger this year
than it was the last; Osbornomics has left the Tories borrowing £245bn more
than they projected.

Here are the calamitous results of a lethal combination of
a shrinking economy, suppressed demand and stagnant tax revenues. Companies are
sitting on monumental cash piles worth hundreds of billions which they are not
investing. Meanwhile, the average worker faces a pay packet shrinking at the
fastest rate in modern British history. No wonder that Osborne’s approval
rating languishes somewhere around minus 40.

And yet, and yet. The Chancellor’s default facial expression may be set to smug, but – given the
circumstances – his performance in the Commons last week was assured,
confident, even cocky. No wonder. Even as austerity has failed on its own
terms, the Official Opposition has not so much missed open goals as fled in the
opposite direction. The Tories’ message can be summed up in one easily
digestible sentence: “We will cut the deficit by reining in public spending,
stopping hard-working taxpayers subsidising the indolent and the workshy by
cutting welfare, and we will live within our means.”

Labour’s current muddled
message would take several confusing paragraphs, filled with caveats and
clarifications, covered in scribbles and crossings-out. Osborne has cut too far
and too fast, they say, but we will stick to his plans. The Tory approach to
cutting social security is wrong, though many of their underlying principles
are right. Many of their cuts are as cruel as they are unnecessary, but we will
not reverse them.

Perversely, this farcically disastrous Chancellor
has been allowed to make the political weather, constantly leaving Labour in a
defensive posture. His declaration that people thrown out of their work must
wait for seven days before getting benefits is a classic example. Working
people pay into national insurance and deserve to be supported when their boss
sacks them, Labour should have said.

The average wait is already more than
three weeks as it is. This will only benefit legal loan sharks – who a million
families now turn to – and lengthen the queues to food banks, who now cater for
half a million people in the seventh-richest country on earth. But Labour did
not make these arguments. Ed Balls instead accepted the underlying logic of a
longer wait – with caveats, of course.

The Tory strategy is to crucify Labour over
social-security spending, aided and abetted by right-wing propagandists posing
as journalists who hunt down extreme, unrepresentative examples and pass them
off as the tip of a feckless iceberg – say, a woman with 45 kids and a giraffe
on benefits, as my colleague Mark Steel puts it.

But as a poll published in
this newspaper at the start of 2013 showed, thanks to our media, the public are
chronically misinformed about social security: about who gets benefits, how
much they are worth, and the real level of fraud (around 0.7 per cent). The
more they know the reality, the less likely they are to support life-destroying
cuts.

Rather than accepting the Tory terms of debate on
social security, then, Labour should be launching the mother of all campaigns to
educate and inform. Most social-security spending goes quite rightly on
elderly people, who have paid in their whole lives. Most working-age benefits
go to people in work, like tax credits, which are a subsidy for low pay.
Housing benefit – which has jumped by £2bn under this Government – lines the
pockets of landlords who can get away with charging rip-off rents, knowing that
you and I, the taxpayer, will step in.

To bring down social-security spending in a
sustained way, Labour should say, we will address the root causes: taking on
low pay with a living wage; controlling rents as well as allowing councils to
build; and an industrial strategy to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, not
least in renewable energy as Germany has done. Such a message would undercut
the prejudices that the Tory offensive depends on.

But instead, Labour’s leaders – pessimistic as
they are about the prospects of shifting public attitudes – fail to challenge
myths, and even occasionally feed them. It is utterly self-destructive. The
more “skivers” or “shirkers” are inflated in people’s minds, the bigger the
potential pool of Tory support. After all, if you really want to give “scroungers”
a kicking, you will always trust the Conservatives best to do it.

And here is the fatal flaw in the Labour
leadership’s strategy. They think they are buying back credibility, rather than
shoring up policies that should be seen as sunk, ruinous, shredded. By failing
to offer a coherent message, they risk a sense of “at least you know where you
are with the Tories” bedding in. But the cost is not only to Labour’s electoral
prospects: it will be to the working, disabled and unemployed people whose pockets
will continue to be emptied.

A generation of plummeting living standards
beckons – unless the Labour leadership’s failure to challenge a hijacking of
the financial crisis to roll back the state is countered. Last week, more than
4,000 people attended the People’s Assembly coalition against austerity, and
decided on a rolling programme of action.

Learning from the success of UK Uncut
in forcing tax avoidance on to the political agenda, a day of peaceful civil
disobedience will be held on 5 November. The gentleman’s agreement of British
politics has to be sabotaged: our futures and those of our children are at
risk. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the appalling truth.

It is fashionable to claim that Michael Gove has
been influenced by Antonio Gramsci.

The thing about Gramsci is that we have never
really needed him in Britain. The insistence on the unity of theory and
practice, the rejection of economic determinism and of metaphysical
materialism, the celebration of the “national-popular”, an organic
working-class culture and self-organisation including worker-intellectuals: we
already had them all. At least, we did have them. Until Gove’s political
heroine, whom no one ever accused of being either a worker or an intellectual,
came along and destroyed their economic base.

But there remained heirs to the organic worker-intellectual
tradition, often very left-wing people indeed, who tried as best they could to
maintain in their own classrooms, until they themselves retired, whatever they
could of the best that had been known and thought, in the midst of her enforcement
upon everyone else of her own utter philistinism and of her own total lack of
even the slightest intellectual curiosity. Truly, her natural successor was
Tony Blair. And truly, his natural successors are David Cameron and George
Osborne.

There had been some grounds for hoping that Gove
was different. But he is clearly oblivious to these facts. He knows nothing of
the trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Guild
Socialist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and many
other roots of the British, Irish and Commonwealth Labour Movements, predating
Marx and long predating Gramsci.

He knows nothing of their roots, which are in the
anti-Whig subcultures disaffected by the events of 1688, subcultures predating
any counterrevolutionary movement on the continent, predating any revolution
there or in North America, and emphasising the indispensable role of the State
in protecting against the market everything that conservatives seek to
conserve, while offering perennial critiques of individualism, capitalism,
imperialism, militarism, bourgeois triumphalism, and the fallacy of inevitable
historical progress. As an ardent neoconservative, Gove is fully signed up to
all of those.

Does he even know anything of their roots,
which are in Early Modernity and in the Middle Ages, in the Classics that he
purports to promote and in the Bible that he ostentatiously sends out to
schools with a preface by himself, together with a reference to himself on the
very cover? Or is the entirety of this Government exactly as it would appear to
be: intellectually unequipped to be the Government of the United Kingdom, or,
at root, to be the Government of any country on earth?

But Gove may yet revive the worker-intellectual
tradition in spite of himself. Under him, universities are to become confined
merely to those whose parents happened to have nine thousand pounds per annum
lying around with no other call on it, and therefore had no need to send their
offspring out to work at the earliest opportunity. Academic ability or
accomplishment will have nothing to do with it. Indeed, they will be relatively
rare among the entrants, one would expect.

Leaving plenty of room for the successors of the
pitmen poets and of the pitmen painters, of the Workers’ Educational
Association (which still exists) and of the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, of the
brass and silver bands, of the people’s papers rather than the red top rags, to
re-emerge in, though and as an organic working-class culture and self-organisation.

That, in turn, requires an economic base such as
only the State can guarantee, and such as only the State can very often
deliver. Not exclusively, but in no small part, that is what the State is for.
Not exclusively, but in no small part, that is why we have it.

The, often born-again, Eurosceptical rising generation around Ed Miliband: the Vice-Chairman of the Labour Party, Michael Dugher (born 1975), writes:

The Government recently confirmed that the German
conglomerate, Siemens, has won the £1.6bn contract to build rolling stock for
the Thameslink line. This decision is a huge blow to Bombardier, the
Derby-based train manufacturer, and a stark example of the Government’s
approach to British industry. Ministers have defended the appalling
decision by citing EU procurement rules, but it is inconceivable that any other
EU country, bound by the same rules, would have made the same decision.

This month also saw the first meeting of Labour’s
new cross-departmental procurement group [which Dugher co-chairs with Chuka Umunna, born 1978], made up of a frontbench shadow
minister from every shadow team. The quality of procurement practise across
the public sector varies markedly and part of the problem is that there is
still a fragmented approach with Whitehall operating in silos. The aim
of the new group is to address this, as well as to develop new thinking to feed
into our ongoing policy reviews. One of the major issues we will be
looking at is the need for more flexibility in relation to EU procurement
rules.

The problems around EU procurement are complex
and far from new. Initially, EU Directives were designed to ensure
transparency and non-discrimination, leading to outcomes which represent good
value for money. But there has been a growing sense amongst British
businesses that when it comes to EU procurement rules, the current system
simply doesn’t function fairly and that our continental neighbours (and
competitors) manage to support their domestic industry in a way that simply
doesn’t happen enough in the UK. This has got to be bad for the British
economy.

In 2004, Gordon Brown commissioned Alan Wood to
look into this area and he produced a report which showed just how one-sided
the procurement rules have been operated. Many British business leaders
quoted in the report spoke of an uneven playing field and how other European
countries were able to fit the specifications of a contract to give a good
chance to domestic suppliers. This explains, for example, why all trains
in Germany are built by Siemens.

In countries like Germany and (above all) France,
contracts are often sliced up into parts so that each slice falls below the
minimum required for compulsory international tendering. There is also
often an important specification that states that as well as considering price,
the final choice has to represent “best value”, a concept which forces
Ministers to take into consideration wider economic, environmental and
strategic industrial factors.

The result is that the single market in
procurement is often a bit of a chimera, with countries tending to support home
industries and domestic taxpayers as much as they can.

The obvious question then is this: why have we
not been acting in the same way in the UK? In Britain, it seems, many of
the problems have stemmed from what might be described as Whitehall's rather
ambivalent attitude towards British industry. For years, civil servants
in Whitehall have too often used EU procurement rules as a basis - an excuse
even - to make recommendations to Ministers that simply do not do the right
thing by the UK.

As the procurement expert Professor Dermot Cahill
said when giving evidence to the new shadow procurement group this month,
purchasers often hide behind EU law as “the problem”. He added that to
start with only 20 per cent of public procurement tenders are large enough to
fall under the EU rule requirements, and that even large contracts are more
flexible than they are sometimes made out to be.

Unfortunately, Ministers in this Government
appear either to share the indifference to British industry or are simply
content to sign off advice without properly challenging their officials.
The Government’s handling of the Thameslink contract is an example of
this attitude. And another scandalous recent example was with the London
Olympics – where out of the 2,717 cars procured to drive officials and athletes
around during the event, only a 360 were manufactured in the UK.

So a complete shift in mind-set is needed in
Whitehall. Public procurement is an important driver for economic growth
and employment and its creative use can help maximise the impact of public
spending. As Ed Balls has said recently, Labour could be set to inherit a
very difficult financial situation in 2015, which will require us to govern in
a different way with much less money around. So how we use procurement to
best effect and best value will become increasingly important.

Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna have both already
spoken about using the power of procurement to support British innovation and
jobs, calling for large suppliers to offer apprenticeship opportunities on
public contracts as a way of sharing the proceeds of growth. And over the last
few years, the Labour Government in Wales has been successfully moving towards
this wider approach. For example, Dermot Cahill said that the
introduction of “community benefit” criteria in Wales has meant that there is
public value left behind when procurement contracts finish.

This approach is certainly not about being
anti-open competition. It is about being smarter. It is about considering what
is best for the UK, in a wider economic context, when deciding the criteria for
major public procurement contracts and when spending British tax-payers
money.

And despite perceived wisdom, none of this is
incompatible with EU law. Of course, there are technical revisions to EU
procurement rules that will help remove barriers for British businesses trying
to access the European market - and this will be part of Labour’s determination
to drive reform in the EU so it once again works in our national interest.
But crucially, we need to look at why we are not showing the same
ingenuity and flexibility that other EU states currently do.

The irony is that by standing up more for our
national interest, and refusing to be a slave to EU procurement nonsense, our
approach might actually make us more European in that we would be acting in a
way that is more like our European counterparts. The consequence of this
would be Britain left better off.

Every time I come to Syria I am struck by how
different the situation is on the ground from the way it is pictured in the
outside world.

The foreign media reporting of the Syrian conflict is surely as
inaccurate and misleading as anything we have seen since the start of the First
World War. I can't think of any other war or crisis I have covered in which
propagandistic, biased or second-hand sources have been so readily accepted by
journalists as providers of objective facts.

A result of these distortions is that politicians
and casual newspaper or television viewers alike have never had a clear idea
over the last two years of what is happening inside Syria. Worse, long-term
plans are based on these misconceptions.

A report on Syria published last week
by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group says that "once confident
of swift victory, the opposition's foreign allies shifted to a paradigm
dangerously divorced from reality".

Slogans replace policies: the rebels are pictured
as white hats and the government supporters as black hats; given more weapons,
the opposition can supposedly win a decisive victory; put under enough military
pressure, President Bashar al-Assad will agree to negotiations for which a
pre-condition is capitulation by his side in the conflict.

One of the many
drawbacks of the demonising rhetoric indulged in by the incoming US National
Security Adviser Susan Rice, and William Hague, is that it rules out serious
negotiations and compromise with the powers-that-be in Damascus. And since
Assad controls most of Syria, Rice and Hague have devised a recipe for endless
war while pretending humanitarian concern for the Syrian people.

It is difficult to prove the truth or falsehood
of any generalisation about Syria. But, going by my experience this month
travelling in central Syria between Damascus, Homs and the Mediterranean coast,
it is possible to show how far media reports differ markedly what is really
happening. Only by understanding and dealing with the actual balance of forces
on the ground can any progress be made towards a cessation of violence.

On Tuesday I travelled to Tal Kalakh, a town of
55,000 people just north of the border with Lebanon, which was once an
opposition bastion. Three days previously, government troops had taken over the
town and 39 Free Syrian Army (FSA) leaders had laid down their weapons.

Talking
to Syrian army commanders, an FSA defector and local people, it was evident
there was no straight switch from war to peace. It was rather that there had
been a series of truces and ceasefires arranged by leading citizens of Tal
Kalakh over the previous year.

But at the very time I was in the town, Al
Jazeera Arabic was reporting fighting there between the Syrian army and the
opposition. Smoke was supposedly rising from Tal Kalakh as the rebels fought to
defend their stronghold. Fortunately, this appears to have been fantasy and,
during the several hours I was in the town, there was no shooting, no sign that
fighting had taken place and no smoke.

Of course, all sides in a war pretend that no
position is lost without a heroic defence against overwhelming numbers of the
enemy. But obscured in the media's accounts of what happened in Tal Kalakh was
an important point: the opposition in Syria is fluid in its allegiances. The
US, Britain and the so-called 11-member "Friends of Syria", who met
in Doha last weekend, are to arm non-Islamic fundamentalist rebels, but there
is no great chasm between them and those not linked to al-Qa'ida. One fighter
with the al-Qa'ida-affiliated al-Nusra Front was reported to have defected to a
more moderate group because he could not do without cigarettes. The
fundamentalists pay more and, given the total impoverishment of so many Syrian
families, the rebels will always be able to win more recruits. "Money
counts for more than ideology," a diplomat in Damascus told me.

While I was in Homs I had an example of why the
rebel version of events is so frequently accepted by the foreign media in
preference to that of the Syrian government. It may be biased towards the
rebels, but often there is no government version of events, leaving a vacuum to
be filled by the rebels.

For instance, I had asked to go to a military hospital
in the al-Waar district of Homs and was granted permission, but when I got
there I was refused entrance. Now, soldiers wounded fighting the rebels are
likely to be eloquent and convincing advocates for the government side (I had
visited a military hospital in Damascus and spoken to injured soldiers there).
But the government's obsessive secrecy means that the opposition will always
run rings around it when it comes to making a convincing case.

Back in the Christian quarter of the Old City of
Damascus, where I am staying, there was an explosion near my hotel on Thursday.
I went to the scene and what occurred next shows that there can be no
replacement for unbiased eyewitness reporting. State television was claiming
that it was a suicide bomb, possibly directed at the Greek Orthodox Church or a
Shia hospital that is even closer. Four people had been killed.

I could see a small indentation in the pavement
which looked to me very much like the impact of a mortar bomb. There was little
blood in the immediate vicinity, though there was about 10 yards away. While I
was looking around, a second mortar bomb came down on top of a house, killing a
woman.

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
so often used as a source by foreign journalists, later said that its own
investigations showed the explosion to have been from a bomb left in the
street. In fact, for once, it was possible to know definitively what had
happened, because the Shia hospital has CCTV that showed the mortar bomb in the
air just before it landed – outlined for a split-second against the white shirt
of a passer-by who was killed by the blast. What had probably happened was part
of the usual random shelling by mortars from rebels in the nearby district of
Jobar.

In the middle of a ferocious civil war it is
self-serving credulity on the part of journalists to assume that either side in
the conflict, government or rebel, is not going to concoct or manipulate facts
to serve its own interests. Yet much foreign media coverage is based on just
such an assumption.

The plan of the CIA and the Friends of Syria to
somehow seek an end to the war by increasing the flow of weapons is equally
absurd. War will only produce more war. John Milton's sonnet, written during
the English civil war in 1648 in praise of the Parliamentary General Sir Thomas
Fairfax, who had just stormed Colchester, shows a much deeper understanding of
what civil wars are really like than anything said by David Cameron or William
Hague. He wrote:

Thank you very much for asking me to speak to you today. I am so pleased to be here, so honoured to have been asked to give this
opening keynote address at your Congress. I’m also exceptionally humbled to have been asked to speak today by this man
– Ed Mayo. Ed – thank you.

Ed does a fantastic job leading Co-operatives UK. And, of course, his
record before being appointed as your Secretary General speaks for itself: Director of the World Development Movement; Director of the New Economics Foundation, pioneering ethical market
activity, local economies and public service reform; The strategy lead on the Jubilee 2000 campaign that helped alleviate debt
for developing countries; A national consumer champion, who we are grateful to for producing an
independent report which will shape the consumer rights agenda in the lead up
to Election 2015.

So Ed is a man who brings people together. A man who looks at the present, with his mind on the future, and knows it
can be better. And then he sets about making it happen. So, inspired by Ed, I want to talk today about a more co-operative future
for our economy – and for our country. This is a great country which has achieved great things. Have no doubt
- we have the potential to carry on doing so. But, the world is changing
at speed, and we must adapt. We find ourselves at a crossroads. We know the status quo won’t
do.

Why? Because our economy has been flatlining for months, there are too many people
out of work, they are working harder but earning less. Because, if we are to bequeath a more sustainable future to our children, we
can’t go on with output coming from a narrow range of sectors and regions. Because if we are to build a better capitalism, we must stamp out the fast
buck irresponsible practices that precipitated the crash for which our
communities are still paying the price. I think we can do better. Actually – I know we can and we must do
better. I’m pretty sure you do too. That’s why you’re here today.

You are here because you know we stand taller when we stand together.
It is at the core of the co-operative movement – it is the first line of a
history you know well. Last month I visited The Rochdale Pioneers Museum - the original store of
the Rochdale Pioneers and birthplace of the modern co-operative movement. Those pioneers were flannel weavers, cloggers and joiners who were
struggling under the harsh economic reality of 19th Century Britain when they
set up shop. They faced what you might call a “cost of living crisis.”
Sounds kind of familiar doesn’t it?

But, in those times, they weren’t even able to look to the government for
support. They looked to themselves and to each other. And by
forming the world’s first sustainable co-op they were able to achieve together
what they could not achieve alone. First there was the store, then the housing, then manufacturing, even –
perish the thought - a temperance hotel.

It was economic
development – by the people, for the people – as participants in social change. “For the improvement of the social and domestic condition of its members” –
that is how they described themselves. And those remarkable people and
their families were the catalyst for a movement that would light up communities
the world over thereafter.

Look at the huge energy and broadband co-ops in free market America, or big
brands like Ocean Spray. Look at Mondragon in Spain, the largest worker
owned co-operative in the world. Or Fonterra, a dairy co-operative
founded in 1874, now owned by more than 10,000 of New Zealand’s farmers.
It is New Zealand’s largest company and the world’s largest dairy exporter. Or look at Dulas, the British renewable energy experts and a co-op.
One half of all the child vaccinations in the world are kept at the right
temperature by solar powered fridges made by them.

This is a living legacy of ordinary people who – by coming together –
achieved quite extraordinary things. The other political parties can speak for themselves but let me be clear:
those pioneers’ values, the values upon which you are founded, are values which
we share deeply with you. They are enshrined in our constitution – a
constitution which says: “by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve
more than we can achieve alone.”

It is a belief that Ed Miliband reaffirmed when he set out our vision of One
Nation Britain at our conference last year: a country where everyone has a
voice, everyone has stake, everyone has part a play to play in writing the next
chapter of our story, our shared destiny. So armed with that history and those principles, when I look towards our
future – that shared destiny – I know we can do better. And we have to do
it now.

Now, because families are struggling in an economy that is sluggish and
unequal. Now, because unless we change our economy so it makes use of everyone’s
talents, providing people with the wherewithal and skills to succeed, this
country will not be able to pay its way in the world. Now, because we don’t want to win a race to the bottom - where we compete by
making people more insecure at work and grinding down their wages - but by a
race to the top with quality jobs paying decent wages people can live off.

And, yes, the global economy is changing – but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless
to shape our destiny. We are not the economic super power we once were –
people talk about the BRIC economies, the fact China is forecast to become a
bigger economy than the US (never mind us) by as early as 2025. They talk
about the emerging African Lions – with 7 of the 10 fastest growing economies
in the world sitting on that continent.

But these need not be threats to our economy – in fact, they present massive
opportunities. I was in Ghana and Nigeria last month and I left there
buzzing – electrified by the energy of people reaching for success, by their
boundless optimism. You know what they said to me? Where are the
Brits – you are our preferred trading partner, we like doing business with you,
we know you deliver quality goods and services and on time. The British
brand is strong and they want our products and services.

So their optimism should also be our future. Yes, times are tough now and we
have challenges behind us and ahead of us. But this is a country that has not
only adapted to change in the past – we have spearheaded it, changed the world
and created new opportunities for ourselves and everyone else.

Take computing. It was Alan Turing who invented the computer. It
was Jony Ive that made it easy enough for anyone to use. And it was Tim
Berners-Lee who opened up the internet to all through his invention of the
World Wide Web. British people who have changed all our lives.

However, to compete in this world and to take advantage of these
opportunities it offers we need a new model of growth where we invest in our
rich diversity of talents. A model oriented towards long-term value creation. A model where social and environmental concerns are a source of competitive
advantage. A model where we realise this truth: ask any business person what their most
precious asset is and they will tell you it is their people.

So we need a model where businesses engage their workforce, listen to them,
invest in them. And here the UK is behind others. If we matched the
engagement levels businesses have with their work force in the Netherlands, it
would be worth more than £25bn a year to our economy. This year. Next
year. Every year. Now, it is not for government to dictate the ownership structures, business
models and competitive strategies firms choose. But neither should
government remain indifferent to them.

Our goal in framing the rules is this: to ensure that business which is most
socially valuable and sustainable is also the most profitable. And therefore Co-operatives must be central to our future, to a better and
more productive capitalism. You already contribute £36.7bn to our economy. The resilience of the co-operative model has been proved in the wake of the
global economic downturn, with revenues up by 20%.

Co-operative models of business encourage the longer-term decision-making we
need. They focus on member value, not shareholder value. Money spent in Co-operative stores often stays within the local
economy. This ‘sticky money’ enhances the vitality and sustainability of
our local communities. Co-operatives can also be stable members of the community as it is more
difficult for a co-operative to be taken over, or to shift its headquarters
off-shore.

However, of course, co-operative business models won’t be the right strategy
for all. While I was preparing for this speech, someone put it to me this
way: “Not every business should be a co-operative, but every business can
benefit by being more co-operative”. And co-operatives are not guarantees of special wisdom or perfect foresight.
We see this clearly with the recent problems at the Co-operative Bank.

It is still too early to make a proper assessment of what went wrong.
As new Chief Executive, Niall Booker has said, “there are lessons to learn and
clearly there will be a time to look back and do that”. Right now the issue is the ‘bail-in’, meaning that tax payers won’t be on
the hook - it will be bond-holders who will have to take the haircut. But
what really concerns many is the fear that the ethos of the bank will change,
now that its shares can be bought and sold - it would be a great shame if that
ethos were lost.

The experience of French mutual Credit Agricole who – for different reasons
– went through the same experience a dozen years ago suggests that this doesn’t
have to be the case. According to Jean-Marie Sander, the Chairman, the
bank has been able to develop considerably, without losing its “mutual DNA”.

But, my central point is this: too much economic policy of the last three
decades has relied on the magic of markets. Don’t get me wrong:
competition in markets is good – and we need more of it, especially in our
energy markets. It is the discipline every firm needs, whatever its
ownership structure – driving efficiencies which benefit consumers.

But that should not be the be-all and end-all. We must also understand the
vital role co-operation can play between firms to solve common problems, to the
benefit of all. Things that improve productivity, but are difficult for one
firm to create alone: like a pool of skilled workers to draw on; research
breakthroughs that can benefit a whole sector; functioning supply chains; and
intelligent, patient finance.

Take the central purchasing function of a co-op like Anglia Farmers, achieving
a good deal together. It’s so good, even the Queen is a member. They’ve
set up a bank too – allowing those with extra funds to lend to others,
providing the patient finance that too many firms in Britain must survive
without. Co-operation and collaboration can take many forms and consist of many
different partners. They could be co-ops, based on the initiative of
firms. Research partnerships between universities and local firms.

Sometimes it will take government to be the catalyst, acting as an honest
broker to bring competing firms together – as we have seen with the Automotive
Council and now in aerospace and other sectors. We can have a proactive Government working to shape our economy of the
future – partnering with business to set direction, to create and transform
markets, to develop our national potential, and to invest in the next waves of
innovation.

This is the way we will create a more broad based economy, delivering
success abroad and fairness at home. More co-ops, certainly. But a
whole lot more co-operative working too – within firms and between firms, and
with government too: the business and spirit of co-operation threaded right
through our economy. That is a vision of the future we can have. But we have to begin now.

That is why Ed Balls – the country’s first Co-operative Shadow Chancellor –
asked Peter Hunt to lead a review into the role of mutuals in financial
services and more widely in the economy. Peter has formed a working group and
will be going out to consultation with co-ops and mutuals in due course.
We expect Peter to report back in 2014. As Ed Mayo’s Consumer Investigation showed, inequalities in market power
work against consumers. When consumers act together, they can equalise
power relations. Labour is interested in cooperative models for consumers
in the energy market – doing for everyone what Anglia Farmers does for Her
Majesty the Queen.

I’m keen to encourage greater employee ownership – not in exchange for
employment rights as the Chancellor wants but as an enhancement of economic
citizenship. Not just in public services – although there is plenty of
scope to build on what Labour began there – but across the private sector too. We are looking carefully at what President Hollande is doing in France where
he has made this a priority to see what lessons can be learned. I’m
interested in the Marcora Law in Italy that allows workers who are made
redundant to pool their accumulated unemployment benefits to fund a
co-operative buyout.

And I understand the concerns expressed to me about capital gains tax rules
for employee share schemes – designed with the Plc in mind, they may act to
disadvantage co-ops trying to achieve a similar outcome. This isn’t the
intention but it is why we need more intelligent policy making that can work
for a variety of business models, including co-operative models. In fact, it may be that merely levelling the playing field is not
enough. Maybe we need to go further in taking action in favour of
co-operative models.

Part of the challenge of setting up or transferring a business into employee
ownership – or structuring it for employee benefit – is that there are few
off-the-shelf models to draw from, and insufficient expertise in our business
services industry to advise. Just as John Lewis had to invent his own
model in 1929 – which has turned out to have been a rather good one – things
aren’t much better today. When Steve Parfitt wanted to turn Parfitt’s
Cash and Carry into an employee owned business in 2008, he also had to design a
bespoke model.

Here in Wales and in Scotland there are dedicated co-operative development
bodies and I am keen to understand whether there is a need for something
similar in England. We can certainly do better in ensuring that the
Cooperative model is better understood in Whitehall, starting in BIS but right
across government. Occasionally probably the spirit of co-operation as
well. We – here at this Congress today – know that together we are stronger, more
vibrant and more optimistic than when we are apart.

To create a better and more productive capitalism that benefits us all. A One Nation economy that generates sustained, sustainable and inclusive
growth that allows us to thrive in the modern world. We must do more to return the business and spirit of co-operation to the
mainstream of British economic life and society. Just as I can point to Ed and say he is a role model – other companies and
organisations must be able to point to you for inspiration.

That demands that you live up to the standards set by your proud heritage. But it also means you shouldn’t be shy about sharing your successes, or -
even more importantly – why you do what you do. The values that allow ordinary people to do the extraordinary. Because ours is a shared economy. Because this is a shared endeavour. And above all, because we have a shared future.

Saturday, 29 June 2013

Considering the claims that the See of Rome makes, then, while individual
Popes might be or have been charlatans or lunatics, the institution itself is
either telling the truth in making those claims, or else it is indeed the
Antichrist, and any professing Christian who does not submit to Rome on Rome’s
own terms must believe it to be so.

Who will call good evil by pointing to the
Papacy’s defence and promotion of metaphysical realism, of Biblical
historicity, of credal and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, of the sanctity of human
life, of Biblical standards of sexual morality, of social justice, and of
peace, and by then saying, “Behold, the Antichrist”? That is the question.

Ah, Faith of Our Fathers. Father Faber was the son of the Rector of Stanhope, and, like a
striking number of Tractarian or Tractarian-influenced converts, his
ancestry was largely Huguenot (as is part of mine, although another side
is Highland Catholic). So his “fathers chained in prisons dark” were
not quite as his thoroughly rousing hymn would suggest.

The grave doubts about three-parent babies expressed in yesterday’s Guardian by Zoe Williams serve to remind us that everyone from Germaine Greer to Beatrix Campbell has long articulated equally profound reservations about IVF in general.

What else that cost as much as IVF but which had
such a failure rate – frankly, it doesn’t work – would be available on the NHS?
Add to that the fact that each year, 80 women who have become pregnant through
IVF have abortions. Read that one over again.

This traditionalist-feminist alliance has been staring us all in the face for many years. As surely as the Old Right-Old Left anti-war alliance that just failed to happen over Iraq, not without blame on both sides, but which really does look as if it might keep both Britain and, possibly, America out of the war in Syria. If we do not take our eyes off the ball this time. The one against global capitalism is also now so obvious that it can no longer be ignored.

As the campaign against Page Three and "lads’ mags" really heats up,
consider, if you can stomach doing so, how the male contribution to IVF
is invariably produced.

At our expense, of course. We buy the visual
aids, to which the supplying of the IVF industry within your NHS and
mine must now be a very considerable source of income.

Probably even a
commercially salvific one, since it is quite beyond improbable that most teenage boys these days ever set eyes on a top-shelf magazine.

Back in March 2009, even the
liberal "Left" media finally
realised what the rest of us had been saying
for years. But in February of this year, the age limit was put up. Again. It had been put last February as well, when
same-sex couples had also been given an entitlement. Only under the Conservatives. Of course.

Meanwhile, NaProTech, Natural Procreative
Technology, is an ethical, healthy and far more successful alternative to IVF.
Unlike IVF, in NaProTech no embryonic children are killed or exposed to harm in
the laboratory, and couples’ relationships are strengthened.

As they are also
strengthened by Natural Family Planning, which is more effective than anything
else if it is taught properly, as is admitted even by the World Health Organisation, which is hardly a Vatican
puppet.

NFP involves no poisoning of women in order to make them permanently
available for the sexual gratification of men. It can only be practised by
faithful couples, and its practitioners almost, if almost, never
divorce.

As for Lily the Pink claims about things such as three-parent babies, we have been here before.

For example, the term "stem cell research" has
persistently been used to mean scientifically worthless but morally abhorrent
playing about with embryonic stem cells, together with the viciously cruel
justification of this by reference to an ever-longer list of medical
conditions.

It remains to be established whether stem cell treatment has led to the
improvements that have been experienced by stroke victims in Glasgow.
But there is no doubt that such cells are obtainable without any
recourse to abortion.

Still, if it is there at all, then it is in the right places. Like coal. Except that we know with absolute certainty that the coal is there.

Shale gas could help to keep us ticking over for a few decades. As a strict ancillary to coal, which can and must keep us ticking over for centuries, and nuclear power, which can and must keep us ticking over forever.

The exposure of Greenery as anything but left-wing is, I suppose, useful for those who might ever have needed such an elementary education.

But it would take a heart of stone not to laugh, even if a touch hollowly, at the sudden conversion of the likes of Daniel Hannan, James Delingpole and Fraser Nelson to the provision of energy by means of secure, unionised, high-wage, high-skilled, high-status, mostly male employment, in this country and guaranteed by the State.

It takes a bit of time, but eventually
politicians do catch up with reality – one only hopes that they do so in time.
Ed Miliband has made a speech in which he says some very sensible
things about, among other things, pornography. I quote:

“There is a culture of increasingly sexualised
images among young people: a culture that says that girls will only get on in
life if they live up to the crudest of stereotypes; a culture where
pornographic images, some violent, are available at a click on a smartphone or
a laptop.”

This is exactly the sort of thing that the good
priest who taught me religious education when I was 13 used to say (apart from
the reference to computers, of course), namely that pornography and sexualised
images cheapen women.

So, what can be done? Because not only do most,
if not all, of our legislators realise that pornography is harmful, they also
seem unable to act in face of the danger. They should act, and restrictive
legislation should be introduced. What are the counter-arguments?

Firstly, any ban would be “censorship”. Yes, it
would be. But we have numerous restrictions on expression as it is. Racist
material is illegal in this country. Why shouldn’t porn be?

Secondly, such legislation would not work, as it
is possible to circumvent any bans thanks to technological sleight of hand.
This may be true. You are never going to stop theft, either; but that does not
mean it should be legal.

Thirdly, where do you draw the line? True, this
is a difficulty, and lines drawn are often arbitrary, but some such line can be
drawn – that’s what lawyers specialise in.

Fourthly – and this is the only real argument
against legislation: if people want to look at porn, they have a perfect right
to do so, and neither state nor anyone else has the right to interfere.

The counter-argument is that no one has a right
to do what is evil, and that the personal will cannot transform something that
is intrinsically wrong into something right. Just because I want it does not
make it right; the thing has to be good in itself or morally neutral to be
right.

Porn is of itself evil. That assertion should of course be verified, and
can be verified by examining the nature of porn itself, something that exposes
what should remain private (i.e. consenting sexual acts between adults) or
deals with what is already illegal (acts involving those who do not or cannot
consent.)

On top of this comes the argument about the
effects of porn, which our politicians have made. It coarsens society. People
need to be protected from it, especially the vulnerable, and the young. The freedom to enjoy porn is not a freedom worth having. In
fact it is not freedom at all. Porn leads to slavery.

Those who argue for a free market in porn are
morally irresponsible. The state needs to enforce the laws we already have more
effectively, and do its best to protect all of us, children especially, from
this menace.

Thursday, 27 June 2013

The last General Election was a contest between a Government not yet quite politically able to commit itself to coal again (although it would have done so by now, if it had still been in office), but fully committed to nuclear power, and an Opposition which instead wanted to pay its relatives and other financial backers shed loads of public money in order to have wind turbines on their land rather than anything that might employ any of the common people.

The next General Election will be a contest between an Opposition fully committed both to coal and to nuclear power, and a Government which is instead paying its relatives and other financial backers shed loads of public money in
order to have wind turbines on their land rather than anything that might
employ any of the common people.

To those who answer that this incident occurred in Scotland, it applies there, too, and the case for coal and nuclear power is as much a case for the Union now as it was in the 1970s.

We attended a service at the nearby Maryamie
Cathedral on Straight Street and at night visited bars and restaurants, which
mostly had a vaguely French, old-world feel to them (except for the Piano Bar
on Hananoa Street, which I recall having terrible euro-pop and its Arabic
equivalent).

It was for a press trip organised by the Syrian
tourist board, which I had obvious qualms about. Syria had one of the worst
human rights records on earth, a deeply sinister regime engaged in all sorts of
dubious activity abroad, and promoting its tourism was aiding it in some way.

On the other hand Syria at that time had just
re-opened relations with the United States, and there was a hope that it could
be detached from Iran, and I believed that more interaction and trade
(including tourism) with the west might provide the best future for Syrians.

The more trade crossing borders, the less chance of boots. Also, I believed
then, as I do now, that economic reform should come before democracy; without
the rule of law, economic freedom and the middle class that follows, democracy
turns into dictatorship or ethnic conflict.

And you’d have to be a total naïve idiot in the
Webb tradition not to see that this was a country with all the worst politics.
Its guiding philosophy was Ba’athism, a sort of mixture of European
nationalism, socialism and fascism, blended in with various local prejudices,
creating a Syncretism of all the most terrible political ideas in the world.

This was reflected in the Stalinist architecture, the banknotes that idolised
non-existent industrial strength, and the idolatry of the ruling family, whose
images were ubiquitous (often in a brutally masculine pose that denotes
strength in this part of the world but to western eyes screams “massive
personal insecurity”).

But I believed then, as I believe much more now,
that people did not put up Bashar Assad’s image purely out of fear of him but
of fear of what might follow. The country was teeming with Iraqi refugees, and
there was a clear sense that in this religiously diverse country the same
catastrophe could unfold.

If the moustachioed men one saw all around were
rather distasteful, then they were preferable to the bearded men who would
follow. For in Middle Eastern politics these days, always back the guys with
moustaches against the guys with beards.

Listening to the choir of young Christian girls
and boys at the cathedral, in the country in which Christian music has its very
origins, I remember feeling profound sadness about what might happen one day.

All around the 5,000-year-old city, with its windy, ancient streets with images
of the Virgin Mary, and tiny old houses and rooms dating back to the first
millennium, one really feels the story of early Christianity, but can it last
forever?

David Cameron has taken time out to chillax and
sip champagne with the loaded fatcats who will fund his next election campaign. While the country struggles with the recession
and unemployment, the Prime Minister welcomed a judo pal of Russian President
Vladimir Putin, millionaire hedge fund traders and TV presenter Tania Bryer at
the Tory summer ball.

Guests in London had paid at least £1,000 a head
to get a seat at the event attended by the leader and his Cabinet. Drinking vintage champagne, the 450 revellers at
Old Billingsgate Market in the City mingled with politicians, including
Chancellor George Osborne and Mayor Boris Johnson – who cycled there.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds were raised in an
auction, with grouse shoots and the obligatory Margaret Thatcher portrait on
offer to the true blue faithful. And there was laughter as a bronze bust of Mr
Cameron – who was at the event with wife Samantha – went up for sale.

But the PM’s blushes were spared by a foreign
businessman who snapped up the artwork for a massive £90,000. One reveller said: “There was obvious laughter
when it came up for auction. Everyone thought it wouldn’t go and there
were no bids until a businessman stepped in. It could have looked awful for
him.

“The event was so lavish, tens of thousands of
pounds had been spent on the flowers alone. Security was very tight and
everyone was told to keep their phones away and take no pictures. They knew exactly what it would look like if
details of the bash got out.”

Guests were treated to an extravagant menu,
including smoked rainbow trout, guinea fowl stuffed with herbs and mascarpone,
and rhubarb and elderflower tart with gingerbread cream. The event, hosted by City boss Howard Shore, was
themed Holding 40, Gaining 40 – the target the Tories have set for seats to win
the next election. Each table at the dinner was named after a target
constituency.

Ex-Ulster Unionist MP turned City PR David
Burnside invited a host of Russian businessmen to his table, including Vasily
Shestakov, who penned a judo book with his close pal Mr Putin. Now an MP in Russia’s Duma assembly, he heads a
unit which aims to spin Russia’s – and Mr Putin’s – negative image.

Seated next to Boris Johnson was billionaire
property developer Poju Zabludowicz who is no stranger to donating money to the
Tories. In 2011 he said he was “extremely disappointed”
to hear he had been tricked into funding the lavish lifestyle of former Defence
Secretary Liam Fox and adviser Adam Werritty, who blew his £3,000 donation
jaunting round the globe.

He was angry at suggestions he benefited from the
payments. But at Monday’s bash he and art collecting wife
Anita seemed to spend an enjoyable night with Mr Johnson. Club mogul Peter Stringfellow was also there with
his pregnant wife, Bella.

In a forthright speech, Mr Cameron laid out how
he had paid back his rich donors through tax cuts while pursuing policies that
have meant pain for millions. He said: “Think of what you have done through
your support for the Conservative Party. Who is cutting corporation tax to the
lowest level of the G20? That’s what you’re doing. Who has brought in the benefit cap? You
have. Who has frozen council tax for three years in a
row? That is what your support for the Conservative Party has done. Who has cut the top rate of income tax making
Britain competitive again, saying to wealth creators come here, invest here,
that is what this Government’s done.”

The PM made clear his backers would have to dig
deep for the campaign in May 2015. And he said he wanted to ditch the Coalition. He
said: “I want a full Conservative majority. I want to do more. “I am not interested in fiddling about with
our constitution, I want a government dedicated to firing up enterprise in
Britain. We have to throw everything we have got at the
next election. This will be the mother and father of all
election battles, the toughest fight in years and we need your support every
step of the way.”

The Conservative Party’s dedication to the memory
of Baroness Thatcher is hardly in doubt. Grief at her death earlier this year
brought more unity to the party than any of the policies David Cameron has
devised for that purpose. In case the point was missed (it wasn’t), a group of
Tory backbenchers propose renaming the August bank holiday in honour of the
Iron Lady (it won’t be).

But when it comes to influencing government
policy, Mrs T is rivalled by the man who brought her down. Michael Heseltine
may not enjoy the veneration of his party but he has the ear of its leaders.
Earlier this year, he published a plan for stimulating growth by giving regions
more control over spending.

Chunks of the report have been adopted as
government policy. Ask Treasury ministers and advisers about their economic
strategy and the chances are that Heseltinian intervention will get a reference
before Thatcherism.

Westminster has been so busy noticing the victory
of the right in an argument about cuts it has barely clocked the left’s victory
in an argument about the duty of the state to foster growth. There is
cross-party agreement on the need to spend scarce resources on infrastructure.

There is near consensus that the state should be doing more to nurture
promising, innovative sectors of the economy. The discredited 1970s practice of
“picking winners” has been adjusted and rebranded. It is now a “modern
industrial strategy”. Every party will have one in its 2015 manifesto.

Not everyone has received the new wisdom. There
are Conservatives who despise all state meddling and think that the only good
government intervention is lighting a bonfire of employment rights and
workplace protection. Osborne recognises the need to keep that wing of his
party fed with meaty policy chunks but his own views are more nuanced.

Cabinet colleagues say the Chancellor privately
accepts that Britain already has a liberal labour market and a relatively
low-regulation economy. Future growth, in other words, will be spurred by
government getting stuck in, not getting out of the way.

Osborne took a gamble on hard and fast cuts in
the hope of fighting an election with a tamed deficit and booming economy. That
move failed. But cynical risk-taking is not the same as ideological rigidity.
Osborne’s allies say his urge to win is greater than his eagerness to parrot
Thatcherite shibboleths.

The really zealous expressions of Conservatism
are elsewhere, in Michael Gove’s campaign to prise schools away from
local authority control, for example, or in a welfare policy that sees help from
the state as a cause of poverty rather than its alleviation. In a fiercely
ideological field, economic management is one of the more pragmatic bits of the
coalition agenda.

Labour detests the idea that Osborne is flexible.
The Chancellor’s refusal to change course has been an opposition mantra. Any
dabbling in pro-growth intervention is dismissed with scorn. Money for
infrastructure, say shadow ministers, is dwarfed by earlier cuts to capital
spending budgets.

Funds aimed at supporting new businesses sit idle. If the
coalition wanted local growth plans, why scrap regional development agencies?
Vince Cable might fancy a new industrial policy but, says Labour, the real
agenda is set by old Tory reflexes: tax cuts for the rich; devil take the
hindmost.

There are obvious reasons for Ed Miliband and Ed
Balls to depict Cameron and Osborne as captives of an outmoded and callous
creed. At a glance, the cap fits. But by belittling the Tory conversion to
active government, Labour misses the opportunity to claim a moral victory.

Under the last government, Peter Mandelson led the interventionist revival with
his call for a more “strategic state” to navigate chaotic forces of
globalisation. In candid moments, Heseltinian Tories concede that Mandelson was
right.

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives dare admit
that their economic views are converging. The fortification of opposing
trenches, separated by boggy no-man’s-land (aka the Lib Dems), has become a
strategic necessity and a source of intellectual comfort.

Yet the proximity is
clear to anyone outside the two tribes. Labour has accepted that budgets must
be cut, as the Tories said all along. The Tories are borrowing to keep the
economy afloat, as Labour predicted they would.

Both want to spend on infrastructure and skills.
Both are working their way towards a more vigorous industrial policy.

Both are
planning manifesto chapters on beefing-up consumer regulation to address the
rage of people who feel permanently ripped off by banks, utilities, rail
companies and pretty much every other essential service, many of which are in
the private sector.

The political pendulum is swinging towards more, not less,
intervention in the economy. That should favour Labour – but before the
opposition can take any credit for the new consensus, it has to prove that the
consensus is there. That means recognising there is more to Tory economic
policy than cuts.

Buried in the coalition’s austerity programme is
the kernel of acceptance that, ultimately, government is the solution to
economic malaise, not the cause. Miliband and Balls may not want to give the
Chancellor credit for getting anything right but they also need to look as if
they are winning some big arguments.

I have an interest in this as I’m running for
Brent Council in Willesden Green. But that means the public have an interest in
it too, so I’m dumping a quick thought here which outlines how I feel about
cuts. Might as well clear my chest at this early stage.

Firstly, the bottom line stuff. I am committed to
the Labour Party as once necessary vehicle for democratic socialism, and I will
follow its rules as decided by conference, including by following collective
group responsibility with any colleagues I am elected alongside at a local
Government level. I wouldn’t feel the same about being elected to Parliament
for a host of reasons, but they are long and irrelevant.

The flip side – though this gives me a duty to
support group decisions, it also gives me an obligation to fight for my own
values and for my local residents in campaigns, when candidates are selected
within the party, and then within the Labour group if I am elected as a
Councillor.

So there’s my caveat paragraphs. What are those
values and beliefs?

While I am prepared to admit that some cuts are
stupider than others, I am also fundamentally opposed to the economics of the
cuts, which are the right’s ideological project and economic solution all
wrapped up in one neat package. Firstly this package is unjust and misses why
we have economics at all – improving quality of life. Secondly, it is also a
package which has failed in its own terms repeatedly across Europe.

Ignored by campaigners: cuts are part of
a right-wing political project

But despite all this context, many local
anti-cuts campaigners are blaming their Councils for cuts which are centrally
decided and then deliberately and carefully outsourced to Labour Councils to
avoid accountability nationally. Local campaigners, understandably angry about
their own local losses, repeatedly take the bait.

It is fragmented, has poor language, has abysmal
understanding of the law & finance, and is content to abandon realism in
its strategy in the hope that setting a deficit budget in tooting will begin a
great global uprising against neoliberalism that is necessary to undo the cuts.
While I applaud their defensive work and awareness raising, the sense of
strategy is mind-numbingly parochial. It is also so distant from the scale and
depth of the task ahead that it is content to sit around biting the local veins
of one of the key organisations in overturning the consensus at a national
level, the Labour Party.

Why? Well, as stated above, taking losses locally
touches more than a nerve, and the Government have sorted the swaparoo in
finance so that Councils have to be the public face of the cuts they never
wanted.

But I also think as well as the good intentions,
it can all go a bit conspiracy theory at times, and the underlying current is
sometimes disingenuous – note, for example, how few local anti-cuts campaigners
are prepared to put their own solutions before the electorate either as Labour
candidates, or for other parties.

On the conspiracy point, hatred for Blairism
understandably runs deep throughout the left, parliamentary and external. I
know this – marching against Iraq and opposing various privatisations were some
of my earliest political actions, and I stand by them. But it’s not always
relevant or the way to decent strategy.

Some more radical parts of the left seem happy to
abandon materialism in favour of emotionalising this hatred, and apply it more
widely against Labour. They are waiting all the time for someone to step into
the betrayal zone, which rests on the assumption that nobody from the Labour
Party is in the same movement or moral universe as them. Actually, that’s
completely untrue.

I repeatedly see people who I know have made
quite left-wing decisions in private being heckled by people who barely know
them at meetings for being right-wing, or involved in some plot that the
accuser cant even put their finger on (but of course, if they have been elected
to an Executive Committee, there must be dastardly plots – one example of where
the paranoia creeps in, and people respond to it by shouting at someone
innocent, whilst lacking the guts to stand for their position themselves).

One recent manifestation was someone from the
left echoing the Tory line exactly by suggesting that Labour Councils were
cutting harder to ‘teach people not to vote Tory’. This involves some level of
self-deception, and can really only be based on an emotional refusal to give the
matter any actual thought.

It’s this that bothers me, because it stops
even the best within Labour and the wider left working well together.

Views on policy may or may not be legit, but the
style and underlying assumptions are empty and sectarian.

Let’s be sensible?

Labour Councillors that have been elected all
depend on Labour voters from last time round, not Tory ones. These people are
also disproportionately hit by cuts. It would be bizarre even for a careerist
to choose to hurt them in this way.

If you can’t see this and appreciate that it
means that Labour Councils are not necessarily in bad faith, I don’t think
there’s much point in me or anyone else trying to have a political conversation
with you, because logic on the points under debate is clearly not what matters.

My local Council has been told it has to find
tens of millions worth of spending to get rid of over the next year.

If it’s about showing anyone anything, it’s about
Labour Councils trying to find ways to avoid this costing lives, and using it
as an example. Tory Councils are not being cut, and won’t have to even bother
trying.

Focus: a ‘pragmatic’ left approach to
Labour locally

If I am elected as a Labour Councillor, I won’t
be promising a Poplar rates rebellion (a legal relic), or to hand over my
budget to DCLG (the legal present), which will hurt the vulnerable, but without
remotely stoking up any kind of dissent on a national level.

Instead, I will be pushing for Labour’s economic
policy nationally and internationally not to concede to the cuts agenda, and
pushing within the Labour Party for the Council to find ways of innovating out
of cuts (a similar strategy to that used by that pragmatist Ken Livingstone and
the GLC, rather than that pushed at the time by John McDonnell and Ted Knight).

I will undoubtedly take part in political
demonstrations and perhaps non-violent direct action.

I will push to build a national anti-cuts
movement.

I will fight at a community level so concerns
about priorities are born out and people are at least listened to, even if they
don’t get what they are after.

And to make all of that a relevant possibility, I
will be ignoring the poorly reasoned ‘Blairophobia’ and fighting for a Labour
government.

That’s better than letting former coalition
Minister Sarah Teather off the hook for voting for cuts to our Council budget,
which is something that in my view our scattered anti-cuts campaigners in my
Borough and others allow to happen far too easily.

Tony Blair is gone, and those of us to the left
of him have new challenges altogether to deal with. Let’s stem the bleed
locally, get this lot out nationally, and make sure we replace the whole lot
with something more participative, more democratic, more egalitarian, and more
sustainable.

If I want my Borough to look more like that, I
need a new government as an absolute minimum, and I see the fight against the
cuts in that context.